[elliekelly]

The legal concept you're describing is "comparative responsibility"[1]:

> [A] doctrine of tort law that compares the fault of each party in a lawsuit for a single injury.

> Comparative responsibility divides the fault among parties by percentages, and then accordingly divides the money awarded to the plaintiff. The plaintiff may only recover the percentage of the damages he is not at fault for. If a plaintiff is found to be 25% at fault, he can recover only 75% of his damages.

The answer to your hypothetical is, of course, it depends! The "United States" section of the wikipedia article has a good outline of the different ways states implement the doctrine. It boils down to: sometimes it can be a complete bar to recovery if the victim is at all responsible, sometimes there's a threshold level of responsibility where it will bar recovery, and sometimes it's a percentage reduction as described in the example above.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_responsibility